Directed by Nanni Morretti
Written by Nanni Morretti
Starring Nanni Morretti, Laura Morante, Jasmine Trinca, Guiseppe Sanfelice
France/Italy, 2001
Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room, a Palme d’Or-snagging victory at Cannes, is unremarkable family drama, cut off from any successful climaxes or a sense of momentum. It tempts the audience to see it as deceptively simple, as a death-in-the-family film with deep oceans of truth underneath itself, and perhaps one needs to be an adult or a parent or have lost a loved one to appreciate the subtleties we, the Selfish, fail to pick up on. The emotions don’t seem choreographed and this adds to the sense of realism, but the rising action is peeled away so that the death of a beloved son has the same rhythm as a trip to the grocery store. What I truly enjoyed was how the solid cast (including Moretti as the father and a psychiatrist) gradually developed a movie family relationship that is clearly, strikingly loving, in an ensemble performance that is neither phony nor mocking. The stock conflict for a film like this would be a family rift or extreme isolation and obsession but, because of this unconditional love, we get no drama; in the one major failing of this movie family construction, the son is an idyllic character we never get attached to. What the film does understand is that the stages of grieving and healing do not merely consist of bawling, and that the earthly life and impact of the dearly departed has not simply ended with his scuba-diving accident (his room is still intact and he receives a letter from a secret girlfriend who knows nothing about his passing). The film reminded me of In the Bedroom – all the props trigger routine memories of the lost son, and the father feels guilt for his inability to foretell the future. The audience feels detached in both because the parent-child bond is never more than an abstraction, covered within a narrow time frame. It’s comforting when the actors’ efforts culminate in the radiant warmth of the last scenes. The final shot belongs to the perspective of a young teenage girl, a character reminiscent of the energetic youth in Wild Strawberries. The image is so moving it catches you off guard, and there’s a hope and sadness in it that seems nonexistent in the preceding hour-and-a-half.
By Andrew Chan [JUNE 16, 2002]